Volume 1 Issue 3

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He was there, every morning, at 8:30, to check his post office box. Ready with his key that opened the long dark square metal chute. Ready with his key clutched in his sweaty hand, five hundred metres before he got to the post office. His bicycle wobbling all over the place, the way his characters wobbled all over the page. He'd look into the box and find nothing. Usually. He'd stand there, not believing the black space in front of his eyes. And thrust his arm in, feeling about, right down the box. Until his hand came out the other side and scared the post office worker, putting letters into the other boxes. He couldn't believe it: fifty short stories he'd sent off to different magazines and journals, and waited weeks and months. An occasional envelope, its skinniness meaning a rejection slip. But most of the time not even a reply.

And he'd stand there in his K-Mart track suit pants and T-shirt and cheap sponge rubber inlay joggers; stand there, next to his girl's bicycle his mother gave him out of pity; stand there watching the businessmen in pinstriped suits and secretaries, primped and powdered and prepared to perfection, pulling out bales of letters from their boxes. Opening the small square metal doors and the mail vomiting out all over them. Full of good news—a tender accepted, a contract signed, no doubt, he thought; full of cheques, no doubt, he thought. And scratched his thinning red hair. Until one of them looked at him, looking at them with awe and envy. As if he was a mail mugger desperate for good news. Any news! Desperate enough to tie a handkerchief around his face and menace them with the wire shopping basket tied with shoelaces to the handlebars of his bike. Rob them of their mail and make good his escape from the post office. Pedaling like buggery up the street, heading for his bedsitter and an orgy of letter opening. He'd go back through the glass sliding doors, fumble for his post box key and look in again: the third time that day just to see if he'd missed the finest filament of a rejection slip, caught up in the darkness. And he'd go into the post office and ask the assistant to check if he had any mail that hadn't been put in box thirteen. The woman would come back, empty-handed, and he'd make her hold up her open palms for inspection. Just in case. Then send her back, yet again, but she came back angry and empty-handed. He'd slouch out of the past office. Muttering. Glare into the space in front of his eyes, the way he did when he was at his desk, trying to write. He didn't see the alarm on the faces of the customers as he lurched towards them. He became noticed, he vaguely suspected, not sure, when the stream of rejections started coming in at last. Better a rejection than an empty space: a type of certainty. Bending down, one day, and peering into the box, he heard the two women, the bookshop assistants pass behind him. "There he is again!" said one. "Yes, I know. He's always here when we pass," said the other. "Yeah, a real creep I reckon." "Yeah, I know what yer mean." He straightened up, looked after them, their fat bums bumping menace back at him. And the smell of their underarm like something dry caught in his throat. Sometimes, he'd break out of his bedsitter: wide-eyed and wild, with lavatory brush hair, after hours of writing. Lurch out into the lethal light of day and scramble blindly down the road as if he'd come out of a dark cell. He'd run away from the thousands of words on the reams of foolscap, sitting on the desk, next to his bed. Sitting there like scavenging birds with black cryptic markings that might take flight out of the window, pursuing him like omens of lunacy and death. He'd go into the shopping centre, past the post office, with his whacked-with-a-mullet look on his face, with his false prophet's red eye rolling upon the shoppers and the shop assistants, who parted like the Red Sea at his approach; him, still in another world, a world of his making, struggling up through the endless fathoms. Him, careering through the aisles of Woollies, trying desperately to bring himself back to reality, bring himself back to shape and colour and taste. Lost in the fruit and veg. department, he'd reach out through the fogs of his plots and find the mangoes. Try to remember what they were called; fondle them trying to remember their shape and colour. And the women shoppers would stop and jam the area with trolleys. The women, looking at him caressing the ripe pink skin of the mangoes. And they'd cross their arms uncomfortably over their breasts, sniff, pass on, leaving the rest of the fruit and veg. shop till later. He'd feel his way into the next aisle, the other shoppers, the characters from his stories, he thought, pursuing him. He'd find the plastic packets full of sugar and jab a wet finger in. Taste the sugar, trying to remember that taste. Moving onto more packets and the fountains of brown and white granules flooding the floor and the gritty sound of trolley wheels on sugar. And the cries of the supermarket shelf stackers as vague in his brain as the endings of his tales. He'd find a sample table with dainty titbits of cooked sausage and cold cuts from the delicatessen. Bend over the meat, sniffing, trying to find his sense of smell. The way he tried to sniff out a good idea back in the black of his bedsitter. He'd pick up handfuls of the meat and stuff them into his face, trying to taste it. The woman, cooking the meat and handing it out to shoppers, standing there. Aghast. He'd leave, dimly aware of tall men with two way radios; the shopping centre security watching him and spilling as many words into their two ways as he wrote. He'd leave the supermarket, still lost in the leaves of his stories. And see the bookshop, three shops down with the latest releases on display shelves out the front. A red rag to a bull. He'd charge, straight into the rows of Arts Council funded, guaranteed classics; and explosion of paperback and hardback, that flapped back down like heavy birds upon his head. And the shop assistants, he vaguely recognised. The two women white with fear.

* * * *

The coppers came around with the restraining order at 8:00 a.m., before he could leave to check the post box. An order that forbade him to come within a kilometre of the two bookshop assistants; an order in effect, barring him from entering the shopping centre or checking his post box. He grabbed a sheaf of his stories, a bunch of envelopes with stamps. Bundled them into the shopping basket on the bike and pedalled out of the area to the nearest post office and supermarket; where he tried to rent a new box and found the word had spread. The post office assistants under orders not to rent him mail space on any account. And when he entered the unfamiliar supermarket, the coppers, who'd served the order on him, were there. "Thought you might try this, sir," one said, as they marched him away to the Black Maria. He was taken before a magistrate, who extended the terms of the order to cover every post office and shopping complex in the city. He rode into town, Saturday night, and stood on a corner: an intersection he shared with a street preacher and a small Salvation Army Band. The Salvos belting out hymns of praise and faith for all they were worth; the preacher telling passers-by of the hard lot of the lonely and alienated, with his assistant, a young girl, handing out pamphlets. He stood there, on his patch of pavement and handed out his short stories to passers-by. The deep wire bin, not ten metres from him, already stuffed full to overflowing with his tales, they threw away. Before they even crossed the road. He persisted, handing out his stories, until the coppers arrived and moved him on.

* * * *

He came back out under the cover of night and searched through pavement bins for food. He held on for four months on bin scraps. Then died of starvation in his bedsitter, three months before the landlord came for the rent and called the police because of the smell coming from behind the wood. They found him with his eyes open; eyes clouded an ink swirl of dark blue; his skin drawn back like old parchment crushing the bones of his face. And his mouth full of crumbs of paper. He'd tried to eat his stories to staunch the hunger. And, mercifully, choked on a particularly rich piece of descriptive prose.

Greg Bogaerts is a writer who lives in Australia. He has had many short stories published, one novel, and a collection of short stories based on Eugène Atget's photos of Paris. Shanti Arts Publishing, Brunswick, Maine, will soon publish three of his novellas based on the paintings of Van Gogh.

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Wordpool Press is a publisher of fiction and nonfiction books in both print and electronic form. We also publish short stories, poetry, and artwork in our online literary journal titled Digital Papercut. Wordpool Press aims to help talented new writers build their publishing history.